Surprising a Picket

From the collection of

MACE is the strategic lead organisation for screen heritage for the East and West Midlands regions. An independent charity based at University of Lincoln, MACE preserves and makes accessible a collection of more than 100,000 historic moving images representative of the diverse cultures and histories of communities throughout the heart of England from the Lincolnshire coast to the Welsh border.

Surprising a Picket

Media Archive for Central England
Muswell Hill
1899
Silent

Faced with the immense logistical issues of taking the new film technology to far away South Africa, the British pioneers sought ingenious ways round the problem. Here we have a Boer War reconstruction shot by R.W. Paul, one of seven he produced during 1899. Many years later he told the British Kinematograph Society that he had filmed on the golf links next to his Muswell Hill studio supervised by Sir Robert Ashe, a former officer with Cecil Rhodes's forces in the Transvaal.

War. Boers attack a camp and steal from the bodies of soldiers.

Robert Paul: Giant of Early Film

The most prolific filmmaker of the pioneer period of British film

The multi-talented Robert Paul (1869-1943) was the first British filmmaker to project film for a paying audience, in 1896. A contemporary of the Lumiere brothers, Paul had been producing film, in partnership with Birt Acres, for his own brand of Kinetoscope viewer since April 1895. Shortly after, he began producing for his Theatrograph and Animatographe machines, enjoying a long run at the Alhambra in Leicester Square. As an engineer, Paul made a number of significant innovations - such as an intermittent mechanism for efficiently projecting film. But he also made key innovations in film language, such as the first two-shot fiction film, Come Along Do! (1898). To cap it all, he was a shrewd businessman, with an instinctive grasp of audience tastes.